


Are You Okay?

by mischiefmanager



Category: Eyewitness (US TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, M/M, Rated T mostly for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 04:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9303929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mischiefmanager/pseuds/mischiefmanager
Summary: Philip's experiences in the month between his mother's death and the epilogue, week by week.





	

During the first week, he couldn't sleep enough. Philip doesn't even remember any of it—he spent the entire week in bed. When he wasn't sleeping, he was lying there waiting for sleep to return—blissful, usually dreamless, sleep—where he could feel nothing and hours would fly by. Lukas texted, and Philip would occasionally answer. He wouldn’t say much, just enough so that Lukas knew Philip wasn't mad at him or anything. Lukas didn't try to come over—didn't press the issue. He seemed to understand the concept of being paralyzed by grief.

There was a funeral. Philip went cause he kind of had to, he wore a suit for literally the first time in his life (that he knows of—if there was a time before now only his mom would be aware of it, so it might as well not have happened because she's not alive to tell him so). All he could think about, all through the service, was getting back to bed. Lukas was there too—Lukas sat next to him, rubbing his arm soothingly. Philip tried to be responsive and grateful, dutifully laying his head on Lukas's shoulder. It registered somewhere in the back of his mind that Lukas was showing him affection out in public and he should probably be amazed and excited. But he was just so _tired_. Seeing his mom's casket, listening to the service. Just the act of keeping his eyes open for those few hours was a Herculean task. So he extracted himself from Lukas and his increasingly concerned expressions, extracted himself from Helen and Gabe and their suggestions for lunch or whatever meal it was—stripped off the suit, crawled under the covers, and closed his eyes. 

The second week, he couldn't sleep at all. He was sure he never wanted to hear the words "are you okay" ever again—he wished there was a succinct way of telling someone (always Gabe, Helen, Lukas, over and over again) that no, he is not okay, without making it sound like an invitation to talk. His other least-favorite question became "Is there anything I can do?" because no, there isn't. Of course there isn't. Unless Lukas suddenly learned how to turn back time, or Helen could raise people from the dead—Gabe was slightly better. He would say "Let me know if there's anything I can do," instead, which was essentially the same thing, but didn't require an answer.

Lukas evidently decided he had given Philip enough space. He texted more than just to check in, and Philip almost felt annoyed at him for expecting a conversation. Except he didn't seem to actually expect a conversation—he never got upset or anything when Philip didn't respond, he just kept texting him with anything and everything that popped into his mind.  

r u ok?

Found this pic of us:

Hey I heard one of the songs from our playlist on the radio

Is there anything I can do? 

And Philip didn't sleep. When he did, it was only for a few hours at a time, and he woke up feeling like he hadn't gone to sleep at all. Philip had heard people talk about those few moments every time a "grieving person" awoke when they didn't remember what happened and then it all came crashing down, but he never forgot. His mind had no trouble at all wrapping itself around the concept that his mom was gone—instead of dwelling on that, it just provided him endless scenarios in which he could potentially miss her in the future. When he graduates. Christmases. Birthdays. His wedding, if he ever has one.

Crying was an interesting phenomenon. He cried on and off through the whole week. Sometimes he would think he had no tears left and was done crying forever, then someone would say something innocuous like "How are you holding up, Philip?" and he'd dissolve into tears again for no reason. He didn't cry as much when he was alone, so he took that to mean alone was better. 

Finally, in a desperate attempt to get some sleep, he decided to get as pissed as humanly possible and downed half a bottle of vodka by himself in his room. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Lukas chose that exact time to show up and try to "help" and he took one look at Philip puking into the trash by his bed, grabbed the vodka (amidst feeble protests from Philip between heaves), and poured it all down the bathroom sink, then tossed the empty bottle in the garbage. 

"You don't need to get drunk dude," Lukas told him, tucking him into bed and spooning him from behind, "I'm gonna keep you happy."

He'd fallen asleep almost instantly. When he woke up the next morning, he was alone, but he had a text from Lukas saying that he'd gone home to shower and would be right back. And surprisingly, Philip felt rested.  

The third week, Philip discovered that the grace period for a person in mourning during which they are allowed to do nothing is apparently two weeks. Suddenly he had chores again. He was expected to show up for meals. People started talking about him going back to school, something Philip had literally not spared a single thought for this whole time. And Gabe and Helen had “found the right counselor” a couple towns over, which meant Philip was now driven to and from therapy _every damn day_ , where he was expected to talk about this shit for an hour. His first question had been about how long he could anticipate having to do this daily, and the maddeningly cryptic answer had been “until you don’t need it as often.” Great.

His annoyance about this was softened slightly by the presence of Lukas, who was seeing a different shrink in the same building at the same time, so they all just drove over there together with Gabe and Helen in a bizarre carpool of messed-up people to see various doctors for an hour, after which they would meet up again at the car, get milkshakes at a drive-thru nearby, and go home.

The therapist they got him was nice, it wasn’t that. He’d dealt with social workers and stuff before and she didn’t seem much different. But to hear Lukas talk about it, therapy was this amazing revelation—he had told his guy _everything_ (Philip wasn’t sure how he felt about some doctor he didn’t know hearing all the details of what they did in the motel) and his dad had even found him a _gay_ shrink, so the guy already understood a lot of what Lukas was going through. He was glad that the counseling was doing so much good for Lukas, but he still kind of wished he didn’t have to go. 

It was decided that Philip could have a total of one month, from the date of the incident, before he had to go back to school. Helen kind of tried to ask him if this arrangement was okay, but he didn’t really have much of an opinion about it other than that he did not want to go back to school, ever, and that was not an option. One month sounded fair enough, so he’d agreed to it—although it had sort of felt like it was already decided and Helen was just asking so she could say she had. His consolation prize for having to go back at all was that Lukas would be returning the same day he did. Philip wasn’t sure whether this would halve the attention he’d get or double it—and he wasn’t even sure how he felt about either scenario, so he just tried not to think about it. 

Also, since the vodka incident, Lukas seemed to have decided it was his mission in life to be glued to Philip at all times during their waking hours. He was usually there when Philip woke up—and if he wasn’t he showed up during breakfast—and they spent most of the day binge-watching Netflix and the entire catalog of movies Lukas had purchased on Amazon Prime (Philip was now an expert in the Marvel cinematic universe). In the afternoon, they piled into the car and went to see their respective shrinks, came back, and watched more TV until Philip fell asleep. At some point most days, usually just before Philip drifted off, they would make out for a little while—gently, carefully, almost chastely. He could sort of tell that Lukas was interested in taking things further, and Philip almost thought it might be a good idea, but Lukas never pushed him or brought it up and Philip _really_ didn’t feel like taking initiative, so it stayed what it was.

During the fourth week, things got a little tougher because concrete plans had to be made about his future. They—he, Helen and Gabe—went to his mom’s apartment in the city and cleaned shit out. They threw away all the trash (there was a lot of junk), put all of Philip’s stuff (which wasn’t much) in boxes, and donated the few nice things that Philip didn’t want to Goodwill. There weren’t many nice things—pretty much anything of value had long ago been sold for money to buy drugs. Most of the items Philip wanted didn’t have any extrinsic value—photos, ticket stubs, stuff like that. Before they left to go back to Tivoli, Philip stood in his old bedroom—bereft of all personal possessions and now containing nothing but the mattress he and his mom used to share, a cheap, empty dresser with two missing drawers, and a wobbly bedside table propped up by ancient phone books. He fought the sudden urge to fall onto the mattress and never leave—cling to the last remnant of something that had once held his mother—but then Gabe clapped a hand to his shoulder and suggested they get going, and Philip walked numbly out of the room for the last time. He felt like crying the whole ride home, but only really came close to tears on the way up to the house while Helen was hugging him. 

As they stood on the porch, realizing that nobody had keys to get inside and laughing about it, Lukas approached with his bike, right on time. It struck Philip that he hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d grown the past couple weeks to seeing Lukas every moment of every day, and he left his box on the porch as he made his way down to greet Lukas with a kiss, because he genuinely had missed him. He thought about how it might’ve been if Lukas had gone with them into the city to pack up the apartment—how he would’ve felt standing in his old room, Lukas by his side and doing that thing he always did—rubbing up and down his arms. He probably would’ve cried again. 

None of it was great, none of it was how he had hoped things would be. But it was getting better. The world was falling into place, and Philip imagined that he could someday make a functional deck out of the cards he’d been dealt.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so, SO much to Jillian_Bowes for beta reading this.


End file.
